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Overwhelmed and Creeped Out

The eligible men are laid out like items on a menu that I can scroll through by flicking my thumb. I haven’t even tapped on a single photo yet when—brrring—a new message appears: “Wassup?” I ignore it and return my attention to the sea of forty-five-year-old men with usernames like “Drunky.” Anyone worth messaging in here? I don’t have much time to think about it—brrring brrrring—because two new messages arrive in the chat window. “Whaat are you up to?” and “hey there.” Ignore; ignore. I’m seeing so many men with questionable facial hair that I double-check my profile to make sure that I haven’t accidentally indicated a preference for goatees. Brrring brrrring brrrrrring. I scream and toss the phone to the other end of the couch, as if this action will repel the men within it. Even though I know these men can’t see my exact location, I feel cornered, overwhelmed.

Blendr is the most high-profile of a series of new location-based dating apps for straight people. It was created by the same folks who made Grindr, the hookup app that’s become ubiquitous in the gay community. In June, Grindr announced it now has four and a half million users (six hundred thousand of them in the U.S.), and that they spend an average of ninety minutes browsing every single day. Contrast Grindr’s success with that of Blendr: the founders weren’t willing to disclose the number of users, opting instead to send me an anodyne statement that they “are thrilled with the pace of Blendr’s growth,” which, they say, “was faster in the first six months of launch than Grindr’s adoption rate during its first six months.” The company declined to say how many of those users are actually, well, using the app. If my own reaction is any indication, it’s no wonder. After my initial session, I only opened the app to show it to friends, scrolling through pages and pages of unappealing men in what resembled a masochistic digital-age performance-art piece titled “Why I’m Single.”

In truth, though, I tried Blendr not to find love, but at the behest of a bevy of Web developers. Around the time that Blendr launched in September, 2011, I wrote a short article declaring that the app was destined to fail. I argued that it didn’t take seriously the concerns of women—safety, proximity, control—even though the founder Joel Simkhai told GQ, “As a gay man, I probably understand straight women more than straight guys do.” Yeah, but probably not enough. Since airing my skepticism, I’ve received an e-mail or Facebook message every couple of months from a male entrepreneur who wants to pick my brain about how to make a location-based dating app appeal to women. “Blendr is generally useless, and there is a huge, untapped market for a hookup app for straights (or everyone other than gay men, really),” one of them wrote to me. “Attitudes towards sex have shifted massively in the past decade or so, not just amongst young people.”

And not just among men. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the founders of every major dating start-up. From the Web-based heavy hitters like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout, How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men. This might not seem like a big deal, until you consider one read on why Grindr has been so successful: the app has a “for us by us” appeal to gay men. But when it comes to heterosexual-dating technology, all-male co-founders represent the wants and needs of only half of their target audience. Sure, they can try to focus-group their way out of the problem, but if an app for “straight” people is to get anywhere close to Grindr’s level of success, women have to not just join out of curiosity. They have to actually use it.

Men are slightly overrepresented among dating-service users, according to a 2010 Duke University study, and when it comes to apps, men tend to be more willing to use location-based dating features. On either platform, they’re far more likely to use the services aggressively. A Northwestern University study found that men viewed more than three times as many profiles as women and were about forty per cent more likely than women to send a message or chat after viewing a profile. “The most desirable partners, especially the most desirable women, are likely to find the process of sifting through so many first-contact e-mails aversive, perhaps causing them to disengage from the process altogether,” the researchers write. They call this “the deluge problem.”

Both Web entrepreneurs and armchair sociologists will tell you that women are different. Despite our commitment to baseline feminist ideals, most of us don’t like to be relationship aggressors. We prefer to meet someone in person, not just browse pics of his pecs. We respond to emotional cues and pheromones and all sorts of subtle factors. But what if that isn’t entirely true? What if women are just as open to spontaneously meeting a man for a drink—and maybe more? After all, in a survey of a hundred thousand OkCupid users, over half the women said they’ve had casual sex. Women may initiate contact less frequently, but they are comfortable reaching out first if they see a profile that appeals to them. Maybe the real failure is that no one has built an app that women want to use.

Some men are trying. When the French online-dating marketer Yannick Rolland helped to make a U.S.-based dating site that “empowers women,” he held round after round of focus groups with the opposite sex. “The main problem was women, especially attractive women, busy women, would stop using a dating Web site after their first experience, because it was a disaster. They got creeped out by thousands of e-mails with sometimes harsh messages,” Rolland told me. “The goal behind it was to make a Web site where women have the power. Where only women can make the first move.”

The result is a ham-fisted site called Checkhimout.com, on which women are “shoppers” and men are “products.” Only women can initiate contact, though men can “favorite” profiles. Rolland says that fifty-nine per cent of their users are women, and I decided to join their ranks to “shop” for myself. The site suggested I check out “products” as far away as Vancouver. (I live in Los Angeles.) Not a sign of a very robust user base. I didn’t see a single man I’d be interested in messaging. Plus the whole shopper-product dynamic made me feel gross. Rolland says that he hears this complaint occasionally—from women, but not from men. He acknowledges that “it can be frustrating for men to be a product. It’s like in the store: If you’re a tin can, you’re on the shelf, and women pass in front of you, and you don’t have a hand to wave at them.” However, he has no plans to change the shopping conceit. However, male users can pay to be highlighted as “featured products” on the home page.

So what do women want? If you look at the precious few dating sites and apps with female founders, a pattern emerges: women want authenticity, privacy, a more controlled environment, and a quick path to a safe, easy offline meeting. Coffee Meets Bagel, which is both an app and a Web site founded by three sisters, sends you a match and then sets a deadline by which you have to either “like” or “pass.” If you get a mutual “like,” you’re instantly connected to your match via text message (without the other person seeing your real phone number). You can choose to be shown only friends-of-friends through Coffee Meets Bagel by connecting the service to your Facebook account, or you can choose to keep it private and anonymous.

“Women are more selective with their own personal agency, with regards to contact,” says Jessica Carbino, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at U.C.L.A. who studies online dating. “Even women who are looking for something more casual, I don’t think they’re wanting to waste their time.” Carbino works with Talia Goldstein and Valerie Brennan, the co-founders of Three Day Rule, an L.A.-based matchmaking service, dating site, and singles event series. It started as a blog on which they advised women where to grab a drink based on the type of guy they were interested in—the corporateer, weekend warrior, laid-back surfer. And they’ve carried over this philosophy to their dating site, keeping it L.A.-only, and focussed on matching people based on which of nineteen personality categories they fall into. The lessons they’ve learned may not apply to hookup apps, however. Three Day Rule caters to women who are searching for Mr. Right as opposed to Mr. Right Now. Women may be averse to mobile apps because they “might feel that men might only be looking for a hot piece of ass. They’re not going to be looking for women who have a lot to offer in other areas, their intellect or their sense of humor,” Carbino says. But even for women “the visual becomes more important when it’s a Mr. Right Now issue.”

The Three Day Rule view of “empowering women” in a dating context is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more complicated than that of Checkhimout.com. “Women are in a unique position these days,” says Brennan. “On one hand, women are extremely powerful and we’re leading the workforce and climbing to jobs that are simply amazing. But, on the same note, we want to be feminine, we may not necessarily want to be the ones approaching the guys. How does that work? You still want to be the girl at the bar where the guy is the one who comes up to you.”

Their answer was to create a dating site that functions as an intermediary. It shows just a few carefully selected matches at a time—bypassing the deluge problem, and saving busy professionals (who are a target demographic for online dating precisely because they’re too busy to meet people) from scrolling through pages and pages of profiles. After hearing Brennan’s pitch, I filled out the questionnaire for Three Day Rule. The site is still in beta mode and not open to the general public, and will eventually be for paying users only. After the onslaught of creepy messages on Blendr and other mobile apps, I was relieved at the promise of getting just a few curated matches a day.

Three Day Rule is working on its own mobile app. “We’re blending the concept of types and also the privacy concerns that we’ve addressed with our members in coming up with a non-Grindresque mobile app that definitely connects people in offline venues,” Brennan says. This seems to be a dominant theme of other woman-led online-dating efforts. Match.com, which now has a female president, is one of the few big dating sites to stay out of the location-based app game. Instead, the company has been hosting in-person meet-ups for its members.

“A lot of people want to meet organically,” Carbino says. Even though the stigma is largely gone, “people tell me that online-dating seems forced. They say, ‘I don’t really want to meet my partner online.’ If you had a mobile app to let people know where men who meet their criteria are and lets women initiate, it could work. As long as women feel comfortable.”

And right now, heterosexual women aren’t the only ones who are uncomfortable with the existing mobile-dating-app options. I asked a male friend of mine—someone who has used the Web-based version of OkCupid for awhile—whether he also used the OkCupid Locals app. “I’ve been tempted to use it,” he told me, “but it’s hard to figure out the hidden codification of the app. Am I meant to just look for rando hookups or bar dates, or am I actually supposed to court a woman through this? It all seems weird.” And it’s likely to stay that way until a start-up comes along that manages to make mobile dating not weird by offering women—and the men they want to meet—control, incredible filters, and clarity of mission. Until then, we’re left to scroll through page after page of unappealing options.